African Sociology Towards a Critical Perspective: The Selected Essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane (African Renaissance Series) - Softcover

Magubane, Bernard Makhosezwe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0865436614 ISBN 13: 9780865436619

Publisher: Africa World Pr, 1999

Synopsis

The Collected Essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane.

About this title

About the Author

Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane is a professor at Human Sciences Research Council, University of Western Cape, South Africa. He is the author of several books, including The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875-1910 (AWP 1996), South Africa: From Soweto to Uitenhage (AWP 1989) and The Ties that Bind: African American Consciousness of Africa (AWP 1987).

From the Back Cover

The sociological and political writings of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane on African political history, political economy and political philosophy constitute a vital portion of a monumental legacy to later generations by an African intellectual who came to maturity through a historical consciousness that emerged in the decade of the 1960s. this was a period characterized by the radical contentious philosophies of history: African Marxism, African Nationalism and the reactionary ideologies aligned with imperialism and colonialism.

The essays of Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane stand at a fascinating intersection with the intellectual systems of Frantz Fanon, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Amilcar Cabral. They are first and foremost what Cabral and Fanon were clamoring for: an instrumentarium of the construction of a progressive African ideology or African ideologies. What enabled them to realize this remarkable breakthrough is that they are a continuation of the revolutionary thought of Fanon and Cabral. Magubane was among the first African academic scholars to have seen the historical significance of Fanon and Cabral, repetitively in the mid 1960s and in the early 1970s.

Written in exile during the Exile period in South African intellectual and cultural history, these essays until recently were not easily historically locatable within the genealogical structure of South African intellectual traditions. Undoubtedly, this had been due to the 'political philosophy' of apartheid and its ideological manisfestations.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Poverty of Liberal Analysis: A Polemic on Southern Africa

Other historians relate facts to inform us of facts. You relate them to excite in our hearts an intense hatred of lying, ignorance, hypocrisy, superstition, fanaticism, tyranny; and the anger remains even after the memory of the facts has disappeared.

-Diderot, Letter to Voltaire

My apology for undertaking this seemingly impossible project-to review so many books on such a variety of subjects-is that it provides me with an opportunity to assess the overall contribution of the University of California Press series, " Perspectives on Southern Africa," to our understanding of the basic issues in Southern Africa.

When the first book of the series appeared in 1971, Southern Africa stood upon the threshold of a decisive period of her history. The guerilla wars in the former Portuguese colonies of Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and Angola that had been simmering for almost a decade were entering their critical phase, which would end in 1974 with the toppling of the Portuguese dictatorship itself. In Namibia, the Ovambo migrant strike had shaken the South African regime, and the United Nations; demands for South Africa's withdrawal from its illegal occupation of the territory were becoming stronger. In the Caprivi Strip, the guerrillas of the South West Africa Peoples Organization (S.W.A.P.O) were becoming increasingly effective. And in Zimbabwe ("Rhodesia") the Africans had just massively rejected the Peace Commission Proposal for the Settlement of one of the constitutional dispute between the white minority regime and Britain. In South Africa itself, the regimen of silence imposed on the African people since 1963 was being broken: signs of ferment and agitation were everywhere, the Black Consciousness movement was growing, and workers were striking throughout the urban areas. South Africa launched its diplomatic offensive, its proposed dtente, in an effort to counter and neutralize the expanding liberation movements. At home it quickened the pace of its program to "Bantustanize" the reserves. The Americans, for their part, had already begun to reassess the situation in Southern Africa and the policy positions they could assume; this was signaled by the Nixon administration's commissioning of the now famous "NSSM-39," with its "Tar Baby" option two.

What is the contribution of the California series to our understanding of the current epoch and its ongoing transformations? What can we learn from it about complex course of events in Southern Africa in the 1970's and about the underlying polarizing developmental processes? Contemporary development, let it be said at the onset, is not a field of study for those who see no need for comprehensive theory of social change, for an understanding of the laws of motion that define the epoch and the social formation under examination. For in examining the present as history, it is absolutely indispensable to be able to distinguish rigorously between events that have long-term roots and implications and those that are ephemeral. One must depict with clarity and a sure hand the real processes at work in their totality and interconnections; seldom will anything less do. Fragmentary descriptions, however voluminous and detailed, provide no substitute whatsoever for sustained reasoned theoretical argument.

Geoge Lukacs, in one of this more provocative comments, observed that "The un- or anti-historical core of bourgeois thought appears in its most glaring from when we consider the problem of the present as an historical problem. In the study of Southern Africa, the common curse among academics is to participate in the tacit intellectual consensus to avoid seeing the present problems as historical problems; to eschew the needed holistic view; and to fail, as a result, to comprehend the real matters at issue either singularly or, more importantly, in their interrelations. Indeed, should a basic issue unavoidably have to be faced in a study, it may be acknowledged, but only in passing and often with the demurrer that unfortunately its analysis lies outside the purview and competence of the author. Instead, reality from the start is fragmented into the domains of the various disciplinary specialists, and the developing whole never comes into view. Once again, the detailed examination of trees eliminates the forest from sight. The underlying dialectic is obliterated, leaving only disparate figures to find their momentary, ungrounded way into the analyst's perforce subjective vision. Marx once pointed out, in commenting on his Hegelian contemporaries, that "not only in their Hegelian contemporaries, that "not only in their answers but in their very questions there was mystification." Much the same in their answers but in their very questions there was mystification. Much the same can be said of this California series. After reading and re-reading the eighteen volumes published thus far, I can find very little to commend them as a whole (although there is merit on one or another particular study). The great majority of them contribute little or nothing to our understanding of the current era in Southern Africa and to deny in their premises its historical originality. Not a single one of the issues critical to an informed understanding of the unfolding reality of the region comes into focus in these volumes in a manner admitting of the issue's practical comprehension and resolution. Nor can it, given the largely tacit framework for analysis with which, or rather, within which, most authors of the series have worked.

What is this framework? The rest of this review-essay represents an effort to answer this query. What follows, accordingly, is not a detailed discussion of each and every one of the studies but instead an attempt to elucidate the unstated conceptual, methodological, and theoretical framework informing the collection of studies as a whole and thus, in varying degrees, each of the volumes in turn. For as Mukherjee has pointedly observed in examining studies of an unfolding reality, what most demands critical appraisal is the authors' conceptualization of their subject matter and the method of inquiry they consequently must employ.

Edition details

• Publisher: Africa World Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0865436614
• ISBN 13: 9780865436619
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 600